Color Therapy
by Flurrin
Summary: Patti teaches herself how to draw. A biographical map of her subconscious: things she knew and never told a soul.


Childhood was still a goal Patti Thompson was working towards.

The other students at the DWMA, her friends, had a clearly defined idea of the concept: coloring books, toys, two loving parents. It could always be broken down into these details even if it came in the form of a specific memory. For Maka, it was being left to her own imaginations in her room because Mama and Papa had to talk, and sometimes they shouted because they love each other so much, sweetie. (Maka seemed bitter about the subject, but only a little.) For Black Star, childhood was giggling and running at full tilt down the hallways while Sid galloped after. Soul would mention the sound effects from an electronic keyboard he unwrapped in his earliest birthday memory, before his life became one string of grand piano concerts after another, and Tsubaki remembered wriggling out of her futon on a too-hot summer night and sneaking frozen treats with her brother. Kid was sans the typical experience, but even he would talk about his father's persistent balance of stern guidance and tight hugs.

Liz didn't talk about hers to anyone, not even her sister. They'd shared enough of it anyway.

Patti didn't have one, but she was working on it.

The parents part she could do without. Kid had done just fine with one all-encompassing parent, and now Patti had teachers she liked, and they sort-of counted.

Toys, however, she surrounded herself with. It wasn't just a single trip to the toy store with Kid buying everything she pointed at. She'd found many already in place at the mansion when she and her sister had arrived. Kid, having no idea what teenage girls required in a place of residence, bought everything from magazines to lace curtains to baby books with the word "girl" written in pink on the title, and Liz was both charmed and insulted, and as she and their meister warred over which objects were appropriate, Patti took whatever had been rejected during their arguments and re-taught herself how to read, slept in stuffed animal embraces, and decorated her new room.

"You don't have to keep all of them," Liz said, glowering uncomfortably at a teddy bear that was dressed as a clown. It came with a lace ribbon and a pacifier affixed to its paw and had child-safe eyes.

"We can't just toss him out in the cold," Patti argued, so the baby-bear-clown remained.

The last common component were the coloring books, and she had obsessed over those until it turned out coloring had become mainstream and bookstore shelves were filled with empty templates. How dare grown-ups reclaim childhood ingredients for themselves. Selfish! Patti was working very hard not to associate herself with adults, so she scoffed and turned her nose up at coloring. Her crayons had better things to do.

So, out of spite, Patti began to draw.

Patti was just Patti. She had never seen herself as a child, and barely as a girl. She was only aware at first that she was not an adult because she did not wield control. She was aware of this on nights when the ring of restaurants in Brooklyn put their faces up on a "refuse service" corkboard and they were lucky to find a half-finished pint of Chinese in the garbage. She was aware when it rained and they hid in the alley because the local squatters didn't want two Devils under the same leaky roof. She was aware when they were first victims of a mugging, back when Liz still carried a purse of their mother's things. The purse was strewn across the alley as the mugger's fist split the skin of Liz's cheek.

Patti saw her sister glow. And then, suddenly, she was the adult, and she was in control.

"Hey, mister," Patti had said, pressing the gun barrel of her sister's weapon form up against the stranger's neck. "I'm gonna kill ya. You know that?"

One moment to undo all hope of a childhood Patti had ever had, until now.

She put the red crayon away.

Liz had raised her, so she claimed. And it was true, mainly, but a sister could never raise a sister like a daughter, and somewhere in their arrangement Patti quietly decided they would raise each other. Maybe it was that moment, the last time Liz ever carried a purse, which her eye black and her cheek bleeding. When Patti first cradled her dingy gun form in her hands and realized she was just as small as Patti felt.

But maybe not.

Liz was not afraid of ghosts because of horror movies and spooky campfire stories. She'd never experienced either the first time she started shaking in her sleep. Patti woke up and felt the cold on them both, but there was nothing she could do. If her sister carried ghosts with her, that was the one thing their gun forms couldn't blast into bits.

She didn't stop and ask why "The Thompson Sisters" had already become "The Devils of Brooklyn" by the time Liz had shown up, alone, a bedraggled but familiar figure on the fire escape stairs with an outstretched hand, promising her mother would never hit her again. Patti had gone with her that day, lungs exhaling secondhand nicotine into the night sky, and never considered how Liz had made it on her own. Or that perhaps she hadn't. That there had once been more than two Thompson sisters, and Patti would later recognize the third haunting them sometimes, either in the color that drained from Liz's face or as a shadowy shape in the alleyway.

Patti never told anyone she could see souls.

Nice people had souls that were a blue crayon, soft on white paper, a ring of sky floating above their heart. But this ghost had never been blue. It was poisoned with red and purple, an angry bruise. It never spoke. It didn't need to in order to send Liz into a panic. It just hovered over the thin girl, draped like a sheet across shaking bones.

"Hey, sis," Patti tried, crouching in front of her to meet her eye level. "Do you think animals burp?"

"Wh…what?" Liz managed, sniffing. Her knees were up to her chin and her hair had fallen over one eye.

"Like, you know, if you gave a dog a big ol' thing of soda pop." Patti pointed at a discarded plastic can that was just as wet and miserable as they were. "Would he drink it and go 'urrp' a lot, or can they not do that?" Patti frowned in dissatisfaction at her own imitation of a burp and went on trying to do better. "Up. Hurrp."

"Are animals immune to burping? …I don't know, Patti."

"Ever thought about it? Ech. Epp."

"No. Why would I?" The poison shadow faded as Liz's breathing calmed.

"You never know when this stuff will be important, sis."

"I guess I can't argue with that, Patti."

"Rrrrop."

"You sound like a sick frog."

Two girls hugging in an alley. Pink and yellow, and the gray crayon worn halfway down, with just a trace of rusty shadow hanging in the air over their heads, a shadow they'd eventually leave behind. Liz never tried to spur inane conversations from Patti. She never figured out it kept her sane.

Kid required no coloring in, but he did a number on the black crayon. Patti had to abandon it halfway through the story of their meeting and crack open a new pack, extraneous colors spilling across the paper. She could only dot his eyes with yellow or the black would bleed into it and make his perfect bright eyes muddy.

Then her masterpiece was done. A sequence. Patti shoved all the crayons aside and arranged the papers. The waxy colors played out her life in order.

Liz, eight years old and climbing a fire escape, ripped jeans and a stolen purse, and Patti holding her hand for the first time. The mugging where Patti first learned how to fire the gun that was her sister's weapon form. Dumpster diving for food, or for anything, on sour nights. The ghost Liz didn't talk about.

And then Kid. Him pressed against the alley wall, unimpressed, only to save their lives and adopt them as his friends. His enormous house and pink, pink, pink everywhere for the rooms and clothes he'd given them. Hot food at a dining room table or in front of a TV, but communally, always with Kid nearby, always with conversation. The DWMA and their classmates. Maka. Black Star. Soul. Tsubaki. Their friends, playing basketball together on a sunny day, and with a giraffe added in the background for good measure.

This was her childhood.

She was proud. Patti rolled the drawings into a scroll and dropped them in the bin. Then she flicked the lighter open.

Two minutes later she, and everyone else in the vicinity, remembered Gallows Mansion had working fire alarms.


End file.
